Thames

These are the Essex marshes and this is the end of the road. Nowhere along the length of the river has felt so wild and so remote. A long, grey horizon dips and rises; a derelict wind ruffles the long, unkempt grasses. Along an embankment a railway line survives: fast commuter trains take managers and bankers and stock exchange gamblers into Liverpool Street and the City.

To the north, there are isolated villages with clap-board pubs and Saxon accents. Roads get narrower, taking blunt right-angle bends as they trace medieval patterns across the landscape. Tidal rivers divide the settlements; houses just across the water, which seem a short stroll away, require a forty-minute drive. Occasionally, amongst this wilderness, a big, tasteless house will overlook a muddy field or a muddy creek, messy with amateur sails. There is a nuclear power station, a twentieth century symbol of loneliness and isolation. Ancient churches survive at the dead ends of dead lanes.

To the south, the Thames has become the North Sea in an uncomfortable collage of greys. The grey water is dabbed with the dull white of breaking waves. On the mudflats, a curfew calls.

The source of the river is now a lifetime away. As we have followed the course of the river from its source, it has grown and matured. It has accepted outside influences and made them its own, blending them into a distinctive character. It has become stronger, too: more dangerous, more aware of its own strength; it has been confined by banks and locks and sneaky canalisation. Although by late middle age, it had become something powerful and civil, cutting through the city with an air of achievement and prestige, now, here, beyond all that, there is a kind of grim retirement.

We, too, have all grown older with the river. The journey, after all, walks in history’s footsteps. There has been a sense from the very start, from the very source, where the river swells out of the ground at Lydwell, and grows into something significant by the remote church at Inglesham, that the river has been flowing from the medieval and the rural towards the modern and the urban. Despite hiccups on the way – in the fields south of Oxford, for example, or in sudden islands in Middlesex – the tendency has been consistent and irredeemable. It’s not just metaphor: the water gets dirtier; the banks get stricter; the houses get denser and, ironically, more expensive.

Now, east of the city, the situation dramatically reverses. This is a dangerous Thames here, blending with the cold currents of Jutland and Friesland, out beyond the horizon to the east. It’s a little disturbing. Order is fragile in this damp wind.

To the west, where the clouds billow up into the wide open blue, the line of the river leads back to the City of London, where St Paul’s and Canary Wharf grope in their different ways for the heavens. Beyond, the river tells its narrow tale of England: the decadence of Cliveden in the Buckinghamshire woods; King Alfred’s church at Dorchester; the spires of Oxford. Finally there are the meanders and the meadows of Lechlade, where the highest lock on the river welcomes careful sailors.

This is the Thames. It runs softly, and its song is sung.